Archive for the ‘Geology’ Category

Over the past several weeks there have been over two hundred earthquakes along the California – Mexico border. Many of these have been over 4.0 magnitude. USGS believes this cluster of quakes to be related to the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that occurred on April 4th, 2010.

A team from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA, made research flights over the Gulf of Mexico this week to help investigate potential uses of satellites for monitoring the thickness and dispersal of oil spills and the oil¹s impact on marine life.

Scientists have unearthed a new explanation for several low-gravity spots detected around the world. They’re blaming the anomalies on vast “slab graveyards” that lie buried deep near the planet’s core.

The amount of explosive activity and ash production at the the Eyjafjallajökull volcano increased on Tuesday and was “strong,” says a daily report from the Icelandic Meteorological Office and the Institute of Earth Sciences at University of Iceland.

Gulf coast residents braced Saturday for the arrival of a massive oil slick creeping toward shore as nearly a million feet of boom were deployed in an effort to protect precious estuaries and wildlife — even as thousands of barrels of crude continued gushing into the water.

The White House said today it is halting all new offshore drilling in U.S. waters until there’s an “adequate review” of a massive 600-mile-wide oil slick that has begun to drift into Louisiana’s wetlands.

The extent of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean grew until the last day of March, the latest the annual melting season has begun in 31 years of satellite records, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.

The topography surrounding the Laguna Salada Fault in the Mexican state of Baja, California, is well shown in this combined radar image and topographic view generated with data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM).

Oxford University is involved in a research project to unearth 30,000 year old climate records, before they are lost forever. The rings of preserved kauri trees, hidden in New Zealand’s peat bogs, hold the secret to climate fluctuations spanning back to the end of the last Ice Age.

A strong earthquake south of the U.S.-Mexico border Sunday swayed high-rises in downtown Los Angeles and San Diego and was felt across Southern California and Arizona, knocking out power and breaking pipes in some areas but causing no major damage.

People stand silhouetted as lava spurts from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull (pronounced AY-uh-full-ay-ho-kul) volcano on March 30, 2010—part of the ongoing eruption that started on March 21. (See more pictures of the Iceland volcano eruption.)

People stand silhouetted as lava spurts from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull (pronounced AY-uh-full-ay-ho-kul) volcano on March 30, 2010—part of the ongoing eruption that started on March 21. (See more pictures of the Iceland volcano eruption.)

IF SOME of the spectacular calving of ice shelves in Antarctica is down to global warming, then why did we not see break-ups on the same scale in Greenland, which is much warmer? It turns out that, counter-intuitively, it’s because Greenland is warmer.